How Smartphones Are Becoming the Brains—and Dashboards—of E-Bikes

Though they represent a minor market in the United States, electric bicycles and motorcycles are booming around the world: By 2016, there will be 466 million of them on the road worldwide. But while electric cars come chock-full of displays on the dash that share information such as range and battery life with the driver, that's sorely lacking in e-bikes. However, a new breed of bikes will use your phone as the dash of your bike, streaming all the data you could want.

Rudy Bike/Bike Brain

Rudy Bike/Bike Brain

For the last three years, Rudy Bike founder Rich Yu has lived in Shanghai amongst a sea of cheap electric two-wheelers. "Mao's vision for Red China was that every family would have a bicycle. That has been updated to the electric bike, it seems," Yu says. These models cost about $300, go only 15 mph and offer little in the way of gauges for riders other than a rudimentary battery meter. The lackluster bikes inspired Yu and Rudy Bike co-founder Rodolfo Cossovich to develop their own bike with an Android app full of informatics that could cater to a slightly more upscale market.

The Rudy Bike runs on a 5-kilowatt DC motor, can travel at speeds of up to 60 mph and goes 50 miles on a single charge, which takes about 4 hours. The app, called Bike Brain, allows the bike to communicate wirelessly to an Android phone via Bluetooth. Any bike can be connected to the app, if you purchase the sensors and have a trained e-bike mechanic look them up.

Bike Brain helps to ease range anxiety by communicating in real time not just the percentage of charge left in the battery, but how long the rider has left at current usage levels. If power is running low, the app can locate and direct the rider to the closest charging station through integration with Google Maps. The Bike Brain also analyzes the health of the bike and its battery, communicating not only to the rider but back to the manufacturer to assess when the battery needs to be recharged and also to provide data the company can use to improve its bikes by analyzing consumer use. And when your bike is done charging, it can send an alert to your phone to let you know it's ready to go.

Yu and Cossovich are currently building the bike in China and are looking for investors so they can increase production. The Bike Brain will retail around $150, and Yu says the pair plan to develop an iPhone app in addition to their Android one.

Ford E-Bike Concept

Ford E-Bike Concept

Ford unveiled this e-bike concept at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September. While the company currently has no plans to mass-produce this model, Volker Eis, a spokesman for Ford of Europe, says the flood of positive response after Frankfurt has led Ford to think about ways to bring the bike to life.

The 11-speed concept, which eschews a chain for a carbon belt drive, sports a motor in the front hub that's powered by a lithium-ion battery built into the frame. The bike has a range of just over 50 miles and takes about 2 hours to achieve 80 percent of the battery's charge.

When it debuted in Germany, Ford's E-Bike had a Samsung II docked on the handlebars. On this Android smartphone, riders could get the usual suite of information you'd expect from a car company's dash: mph, distance traveled, range, average speed, system diagnostics, service reminders and battery life. Through a smartphone, a rider could also choose one of three modes—Economy, Comfort, or Sport.